


ain't it like thunder under earth

by auxanges



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Church Sex, Dubious Consent, Hate Sex, Humanstuck, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-17 21:35:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16982226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxanges/pseuds/auxanges
Summary: “I oughta grovel, huh?” Your temper crack-pops like kindling. “Beg for absolution? I oughta fucking mourn your cause! Woe unto thee, Kanny Vantas, so pious you’d blow every angel in the host, bested by the sins of the flesh! Deliverance!”





	ain't it like thunder under earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Shame_Basement](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Shame_Basement/gifts).



> for bean, who wanted some humanstuck cronkri where No One Has A Good Time. i, on the other hand, had an excellent time
> 
> thank you as always for being a pleasure to work with <3

You are not a good man, nor have you pretended to be. Knowing yourself is the real liberation, is how you see it—sitting third pew in Church is more of a saving-face game. At the end of the day, that’s what Mass is: a little incense, a little song, a hell of a mutually agreed-upon show. 

The son of the preacher is a master of solemn theatrics, his skinny ass parked on the bench to your left, polished bells on their stand beside his shoes. His hair is like old copper, his eyes not much darker, and when you bow your head and close your eyes he sits on your chest like the crushing weight of the four embossed walls your old-money reputation drags you to. 

You are not a good man, and neither, you believe, is Kankri. 

He’s second to receive the Eucharist, after his father. You watch him part his lips, drinking: your knees on the bench press a little tighter together. When the usher motions for your pew to stand, you don’t look away. You hold out your tongue for the wafer and wink between the Son and the Holy Ghost. 

(It’s always impossible to tell who hates it more, you or him.)

You pray with your good eye open. Kankri pays you no mind, looks like. But your good eye is damn great, and it sees what you see every Sunday: the white knuckles of his clasped hands, ghosts to the open cuts on yours where they connected with your brother’s jaw. Kankri’s own mouth is a taut line. You stare down the bobbing of his Adam’s apple, and forget to breathe. 

There’s a war in the preacher’s son that will fell you before first snowfall. 

*

You don’t bother staying for the recessional, but you don’t go home, either. Instead, you loiter in the cemetery and smoke half a pack while you wait for the congregation to file out. Minutes trickle by. You blow on your hands and jam them deep in your pockets. 

Eventually, the preacher steps out with no glance back. And then he’s gone, and you slip through the doors like fog. 

Kankri’s still here. You know this because he’s always here, lighting all the candles and putting them out against and just—just _standing_ there, palms out at his sides in a space so vast it has no business crushing your lungs the way it does. 

Your shoes are loud on the stone floor. Or maybe that’s your heartbeat, you can’t be sure. This place is old, and holier than he’ll ever be able to play at. 

“There’s nothing for you here.”

The walls and paintings and winged statues carry his voice. You could hang yourself with the thickness of it, sticky with lies. 

“You ever get tired of repeatin’ yourself?” you counter: someone’s tarred your throat til you sound like your old man. It’s unfortunate. 

At the entrance to one of the chapels, Kankri almost looks innocent. If you were stupid, or kind, it might make you pity him enough to believe it.

“I can’t,” he says, and you hear the creak in his voice, the rusted hinge of hesitation you can sink your goddamn claws into, “I can’t give you what you need, Cronus.”

“Bullshit.” You put out your last cigarette with your heel, and relish the way he bristles. “You don’t want to.”

“Of course I don’t want to.”

It has never been a question of want. The nights where you wake up with one hand over your mouth and the other around your cock ruin you, rubbing rings around your eyes at the breakfast table. 

“Cronus,” he repeats. Fuck, when did he move? You could touch him; you could throttle him, right here on the floor in front of the quire. _Every holy space has a little blood,_ Danny supplies in the back of your head. _Every man of God fancies himself a martyr._

Your laugh chokes its way out of you. 

“Self-flagellation,” you crow, humourless. “I’m your fuckin’ whipping post.”

“Do not,” starts Kankri, but his reprimands trip over one another and he trails off.

“I oughta grovel, huh?” Your temper crack-pops like kindling. “Beg for absolution? I oughta fucking mourn your cause! _Woe_ unto thee, Kanny Vantas, so pious you’d blow every angel in the host, bested by the sins of the flesh! Deliverance!”

With your arms flung wide, playing the supplicant, you half expect lightning to blast you to shitty pieces. A mercy that’d be. 

A cloud has passed over Kankri’s face. Your pants are tight, your mouth dry. “Aren’t you tired of acting the better man?” he asks finally. His voice could hone a dagger.

“Rich, comin’ from you.”

“Aren’t you _tired_ ,” he continues, “of throwing yourself so irritatingly blindingly against a wall? Of denying fault so much Saint fucking Peter” —his arm twitches, like he’s restraining the urge to cross himself— “thinks that’s taking it a little far?” 

“Kan—”

“I see you! Every Sunday, making eyes over everyone’s heads. You think getting to me will clear your path or something?”

Oh, ain’t that some shit. “You think this is about saving me? Your prick won’t keep me from goin’ under and we both know it, so save it for someone stupid.” 

Kankri registers your own advance, puffing his chest and shuffling backwards until you hit the first quire step. “You hypocrite,” he sneers anyway, “thinking I’d ever debase myself to using you? Do you listen to anything my father says?”

“You,” you hiss, your hand fisted in his shirt, “will never be your father.”

When Kan smiles, you feel it close around your insides. “That’s funny. I was about to say you’re too much like yours."

You punch the preacher’s son in the teeth. He kisses you. 

His blood is all over your tongue, and you want to gag; a groan escapes you instead, and Kankri’s face twists in a way that sets your stomach heaving, your arousal blasting a hole between the cherubs on the ceiling. 

You palm his dick, and even though you expect it your eye still sings when he headbutts you. He gets a squeeze for that one, right through his Sunday best.

Kan moans, and it rips you to pieces. You hook one ankle around his and let yourself drop with him between the quire benches. Everything smells like smoke and stunted sex. 

“I’ll kill you,” he rasps, when you have your knees on his thighs and work at his fly. 

“Promises.”

You’re so turned on it feels like another punch. Under your hand, you can feel his cock jump when you rub it with the heel, just above your pulse. 

“Oh, god,” says Kankri, and just like that your pants are off, huh. Did you pull them down? No, your hands are on his wrists. You lower one for him to suck on your fingers and shut him up for a while, try to remember what a train of thought feels like. 

He—he keeps his arms raised, shackled to that whipping post you’ve supposedly erected for him. You’d love to tear out his heart. 

You settle for driving your fingers down his throat to the knuckle. Kan gags; the wet whimper when you pull that out makes you want to taste it, and you do, and it’s just as awful as you’d guessed. 

“You’re sure I’m the one who needs this?” you preen, walking your fingers down along the barely-there tracks of his ribs. “You’re starved for it, man, look at you.” 

God, is he crying? He’s got this horrible _softness_ to him, under the spit-covered pads of your fingers. You can feel it when he trembles. You’d laugh if your body remembered how. 

When you pry him open and scissor in deeper, it is not with mercy. Kankri shrieks loud enough to rouse the statues, which is fine ‘cause half of you is still waiting for the heavenly soldiers to come wreck your shit. It’s the decent thing to do. But then Kan lifts his ass off the ground, one fist smacking the bench caging you in. All masochists, these holy men. If you had a little less sense in you, maybe you’d listen to your brother more. 

Kankri hits the bench again, and one of the candles he’d been replacing tips over. Wax lands on the back of your neck, and you bite down on several choice words. Wax lands on his wrists, angry and pink, and wow, that is a powerful expletive. You’re not sure what forced it out more, the burn or the way your fingers curled painfully on reflex. 

Oh, well. You’re here now, aren’t you? 

You pull your fingers free, stroking yourself with minimal care for how good it feels. None of this feels good; you are not a good man. Kan stops his senseless pleading long enough to look down at you, and hah, you have a front-row seat to the way his eyebrows disappear into his hair. 

“Oh,” he says again, “oh, Jesus, no—”

“Close enough,” you mutter, and piston your hips. 

Fuck, the kid’s tight. He _yelps_ , you’ve never been much of a yelper but you remember how it feels to have someone take you so suddenly, clinically, to fill this monster of a need. It melts your spine down to the soles of your feet, coherence pooling along with the drying wax on the floor. You lift his thighs with your palms and roll into him slower, until the pathetic sound drops octave into something that coils deep, deep in you. 

That’s it. 

Maybe you say it out loud, ‘cause now Kankri is staring at you. Or trying to. He’s not great at the whole focusing thing, you guess. You can see the anger in his eyes, colouring them all funny like you lit a whole pack of those dumb little candles. You are burning from the inside out. Every time you move sends shockwaves through all your insides; your hair stands up on end. If this is dying, you should have introduced yourself to the firing squad ages ago. 

Hold up.

“Hold up,” you say. Your voice is gravelly, and you don’t bother acknowledging that Kankri is probably right, you’re too much like your father. “You done this before, Kan?”

He says nothing. The fire in his eyes wavers and goddamn, but you can really see the waterworks now. You bark out a laugh, brash and wordless and ugly, you are the _ugliest fucking creature—_

“Are you shitting me? This is every cliché in the book, buddy, no wonder you’re so wound up all the time, that daddy’s boy act does you no favours—”

Kan spits. It almost catches you in the eye, and if the angels in the wings were still sleeping they’re about to file a noise complaint because you’re raining fury on the bastard. 

He changes his game about halfway to climax, finding the tense knobs of your spine through your shirt and digging claws in til the fabric is wet. You smack your head three times on the back of the pew, and he smacks his twice. He tears your name in neat little strips between his teeth and you lick them right out of his mouth, and when you come you swear to god you break something, either you or the goddamn quire steps. 

Kankri shakes long after you pull out, his hands over his face like he can fashion himself a new one that you’ve yet to lay eyes on. For an endless moment, he makes no sound. This is worse; the quiet is always worse.  

You’re zipping up your fly when you hear him mumble something. “What?” 

“I said go to hell,” Kan snaps. He sounds much like you both feel.  

You fix your hair and reach in your pocket for your ciggies. “Way ahead of ya, champ,” you reply, sticking one in the corner of your mouth and offering the pack to him.  

“I don’t smoke, Cronus.”  

Unfair of the world to still make your name on his lips sound like the closest you’ll ever get to heaven.  

“You do now,” you say, and for the second time today you agree on something. 


End file.
